Israel Could Really Lose This One
Israel Could Really Lose This One
A deep dive into the Tactics and Geostrategics of the Gaza Invasion
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
I’m currently deep diving a lot of history of the Israel-Palestine conflict so I can comment better on the morality of the issues at hand and various claims with regards to international law.
And some of the Israel supporters who follow me on Twitter are almost certainly internally (or maybe externally) screaming about how this or that assessment is wrong, or this or that claim is morally bankrupt, and this or that policy is totally justified… Or that I’m irrationally (and maybe anti-semitically) hostile to Israel…
But setting aside whether cutting off water, food, and fuel to 2 million civilians and a dozen hospitals constitutes an act genocide… There is something far more pressing that makes me feel I have to speak:
The real reason I’m more critical of Israel (and Ukraine) than other regional actors who are quite arguably just as bad or worse (and Saudi Arabia is almost certainly worse, both in its apartheid of women, and its genocide of Yemenis)…
The real reason I’m critical of Israel is it is trying to draw the US into the region. Indeed the vast majority of its policies and belligerence presumes and demands US backing to a degree that no American concerned about their own national interests should find acceptable.
This is why “No one holds other nations to this standard” is such a dumb argument. Turkey and Azerbaijan have been fucking over Armenian Christians for a century and commit horrifying crimes against them, but they aren’t demanding the US taxpayer subsidize their crimes by billions of dollars annually or provide tacit military guarantees in case the Georgians or Romanians object and threaten military action.
This demand on the American people could well cause the deaths of 10s of thousands of Americans, break the faltering American empire and economy, and possibly escalate into nuclear war… And very possibly damn the Palestinians and Israelis to a truly horrifying end.
Russian Nesting Dolls of Hostages and Bickering
The 200 Hostages in Gaza
As everyone knows this round of violence began when Hamas successfully (and tactically quite impressively) raided dozens of miles past the Israeli blockade, attacking military and civilian alike, killing 1300 combined military and civilian, and capturing more than 200 hostages back to Gaza, including Flag officers of the Israeli Defence Force.
Hamas has in the past been able to exchange hostages at very favourable ratios in return for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, so I’ve seen speculation that their endgame is probably to use them in a negotiated ceasefire for similar terms… but that’s speculation from libertarian commentators.
Their statements have been more bellicose threatening to kill hostages for each bomb that kills Palestinians, however by now they’d have no hostages left if they did, and on the contrary we’ve seen them release several hostages for “Humanitarian Reason”.
It was obviously a calculated move to send signals to the US and others about Hamas’s willingness to negotiate, and try to divide it’s opposition, but a far cry from the threats other factions of Hamas and Gazan Militants have made.
This is one of the key factors people gloss over when talking about Hamas or the Gazans, they’re riven by factions and different ideological commitments like anyone else, to say “Hamas believes X” or “Hamas wants X” is always going to be a simplification, just as saying “Israel wants X” almost laughably over simplifies the massive ideological and factional conflicts within even the Jewish population of Israel.
Individuals and unified sub-factions “want” things, what large coalitions and nations “want” out of a war or negotiation is a nebulous thing that only really emerges and takes shape in the reality of fighting and the diplomacy, and cloak and dagger infighting that results. Remember this. This will be important.
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Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades within Gaza had an estimated strength of 15,000-40,000 between 2015 and 2020… but that number has almost certainly crept up to 50-100k today once you include whatever recruiting effort they had building up to this, and volunteers since the Israeli bombing campaign began.
If they had a full “Germany 1945” conscription of every man, woman, and child they could terrify into wielding a rifle, they might be able to get that up to 200k… but they probably wouldn’t just because at some point that damages the cohesion they desperately need, and even with their smuggling efforts it is doubtful they have that much in spare ammo and rifles.
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The 2 million Hostages that is Gaza
The thing is this dynamic repeats self similarly as we scale up…
Israel with the assistance of Egypt has maintained a blockade of Gaza since 2005 (with Egypt receiving several billions of dollars in foreign AID annually from the US conditional on this and other cooperation with Israel). The Egyptian Government has also expressed that they cannot open their border to Gaza lest that turn into tacit recognition of Hamas’s governance there and undermine the Palestinian Authority, who officially, but not in reality, is the recognized government of both the West Bank and Gaza… They wield no power in Gaza.
However there are several unstated motives for Egypt to participate in this… the first and most often openly stated, is that any Exodus of Palestinians from Gaza would almost inevitably be blocked by Israel from ever re-entering and become a permanently displaced refugee population like you see in Lebanon or Jordan… Egypt likes this explanation because then their maintenance of the blockade has some air of supporting the Palestinian cause, but the more immediate explanation is they really don’t want 2 million refugees settling in the Sanai and the remnants of Hamas becoming to Egypt what Hezbollah is to Lebanon, a semi-sovereign armed faction increasingly in the driver’s seat of Egyptian politics soaking up aid and arms from wealthy sympathetic Gulf Arabs and Iran.
This is really important because so many openly stated plans to displace the Gazans into the Sanai region of Egypt are incredibly geopolitically hostile acts. Imagine how the US would feel if a country like Cuba was trying to displace what proportionate to the population would be 6 MILLION armed and terror-prone El Salvadorians into the US, and will inevitably start decades of wars on America’s door step?
Doubtful it would politely allow it.
Of course Israel would like to arrange it that millions of Gazans are there at the wall with Egypt and the cruel Egyptians just wouldn’t let them in, the heartlessness of the Egyptians, so betraying the spirit of Nuremberg and refusing to Aid refugees.
Why, the Palestinian sympathetic Egyptian population might revolt and demand they be let in!
Of course the Egyptian government sees the protests in support of Palestine, and President Sisi knows his two predecessors were overthrown in the past 10 years by the protesting population combined with factions of the military… and almost certainly in his personal life hates Israel like every other Egyptian, and especially the Egyptian army given their history of surprise attacks against Egypt from Suez to the 6 Day War.
Sisi could go escalate first. He almost certainly wouldn’t declare war for fear of the US carrier groups in the region or losing his Annual infusion of American cash…
But he could go to the dangerous, nigh world-ending extreme… of treating the Gazan border like any other border.
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Right now the Egyptians assist with Israel’s blockade. this varies between a vigorous crackdown on smuggling to a laissez faire attitude… sometimes criminals and Devout junior officers can smuggle a lot to Hamas, sometimes they really crack down…
But in an extreme scenario Egypt could just stop enforcing the blockade… At All.
Now many of you will object: “But you just said Egypt needs to keep the Gazans in! Ending the Blockade would spell disaster for them!”
No that’s what adopting an EU style Schengen area open border would do. Egypt could just enforce a normal border!
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If you are an American and fill your pickup truck with guns, terrorists, and high explosives and drive to the Mexican or Canadian border… No US border guard will stop you.
If you have multiple murder warrants and make a mad burn to the mexican border, no US border official will stop you. There is no checkpoint. You can enter Mexico without ever speaking to a US official.
Once you’re in MEXICO a Mexican border guard will ask you for your papers and customs questions (or not if you pass a bribe or cross at an especially busy time and they think you look like a tourist)
But basically no country in the world, save real hellholes like North Korea, restrict good and people from LEAVING the country.
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Egypt could unilaterally declare, in light of the humanitarian crisis and what it’ll call Israeli war crimes, that it must cease restricting the flow of goods and people into Gaza, and treat its border with Gaza the way America treats its border with Mexico: An open highway to guns criminals and ne'er-do-wells… Its possible 10s if not hundreds of thousands of angry Egyptian and Arab young men might make the pilgrimage to Gaza for their Jihad (relieving Egypt and the Gulf States of their troublemaking).
Sure the US would immediately cut off its aid to Egypt and maybe bring down sanctions… but it doesn’t really matter. Any negotiated end to the crisis will depend on Egypt resuming enforcement of its blockade, and friendly enough relations with Israel that Israel can let its reserves go back to civilian work, and that will depend on Aid and good economic standing being restored to Egypt. Given the choice between the Israelis who have failed to overthrow Egyptian governments several times, and the anger of the Egyptian people who’ve taken down two governments since 2010… It’s a gamble Sisi would probably take if pushed.
That’d leave Israel the only option of attacking Egypt and hoping the US carrier groups join in… But this still, best case, would probably just be a replay of Suez where the British, French, and Israelis attacked Egypt but had no means of diplomatically securing a lasting victory.
America isn’t positioned to actually occupy or take over Egypt, and Israel certainly doesn’t have the forces to unilaterally maintain a war given what’s building on its other borders… So if President Sisi and Egypt decide to unilaterally withdraw from the blockade “Temporarily for humanitarian reasons” Israel might have to take 10s of thousands of arms and fighters pouring into Gaza with no recourse.
Also remember that Egyptian society is itself riven with Factionalism… If this crisis draws on long, Sisi and the US aligned military establishment might not be the ones making decisions.
As is Egypt has 438,000 active personnel and 479,000 reserves. Even in the kind of lighting war that Israel’s traditionally outperformed it neighbors on, and even across the barren Sinai peninsula with endless desert that favour technology over numbers… that’s nothing to sneeze at.
If Egypt winds up in a place where it either HAS to intervene for its population’s outrage, or a broad Coalition looks like it’s going to attack Israel and Egypt can’t politically stay out… the Egyptian military would be much more than a mere fraction of Israel’s military would be equipped to deal with.
As of writing Drone strikes have just exploded in Egyptian Taba by the red sea. Israel claims to have shot down the drones and blames Iran Aligned Houthi rebels in the region, claiming they were targeted towards Israel’s southernmost towns near Elat…
Doesn’t mean this border is going to go red hot, but it is warmer than it was.
The Northern Border
As of Writing Israel and Hezbollah are already exchanging fire along Israel’s border, and they were already exchanging smoke and tear gas with the Lebanese Army in the past month… Meanwhile, in Syria, Israel has launched airstrikes against Damascus and Syrian Airports.
For all intents and purposes, Israel is already in a state of war with its two northern neighbors.
Hezbollah claims 100,000 fighters, though some sources put this lower around 45,000. However almost all of Hezbollah’s fighters are quite radical and trained as light infantry. Indeed I’ve seen fairly respectable commentators state that Hezbollah’s Infantry is better than Israel’s… Which isn’t necessarily too hard to believe when you recall many of these fighters have been travelling to Syria and elsewhere in the region to gain combat experience and exert influence, and unlike Israel which runs off a conscription system where fighters are out in 2-3 years and back to their careers, for large segments of Hezbollah this is their career.
Hezbollah, in addition to the money it carves out of Lebanon through “legal” and illegal protection rackets and schemes as one of the largest political entities in the country, it has also been receiving close to 700 million a year from Iran to arm and train itself, and build up a missile and rocket stockpile that now numbers 80-120 thousand. Most of these are dumb homemade missiles such as Hamas fields. But several thousand of them are quite long range, and have advanced Iranian guidance systems… leading to concerns for Tel Aviv, Us Carrier Groups, and Israel’s nuclear weapons facilities which are thought to be in the North and which are rather difficult to conceal from concerted adversaries.
Needless to say, Israel’s Iron Dome, and America’s THAAD systems in the region are not equipped to deal with this volume of fire… And a chess/poker match threatens to ensue over what will and won’t be responded to, how many missiles and anti-missiles each side would be willing to use, whether or not Hezbollah would be willing to attempt missile strikes on a carrier strike group or nuclear manufacture or launcher facility… and whether Hezbollah would actually use it’s 100k rockets and missiles if push came to shove, or whether it is obliged to Iran to keep much of it in reserve as a deterrent against US attacks on Iran directly.
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Also a potential Israeli attack on Hezbollah or Invasion of Lebanon risks drawing it into conflict with the Lebanese army with an Active force of 95,000 and 35,000 reserves… This isn’t a particularly strong or good army… but combined with Hezbollah, Syria right there, and tacit Iranian backing, a potential full scale invasion of Lebanon looks like a nightmare for the IDF.
This brings us to Syria, with whom, again, Israel is already in a low intensity war (of rather high intensity as far as low intensity wars go).
The Syrian Army is ~130,000 strong and has been involved in basically unending combat since 2011. Syrian officers have seen basically every kind of combat in its most modern variant in the past 10 years: from the urban fighting in Aleppo, to the mountainous tunnel fortresses of Kurdistan, to the Mad Maxian home-built war-rigs of ISIS. Their economy is crap, and Assad’s regime may depend on Russia to prop them up… but they have experience that basically no force in the world has, have demonstrated a shocking resolve throughout the horrors of the civil war… And “The Assad Curse” states that anyone saying “Assad must go” will inevitably leave the world’s stage before he does.
Syria is also vital for another reason:
The US invasion of Iraq turned Iraq into a capital-D Democracy… as flawed as American foreign policy is, this scheme actually worked. Your vote matters in Iraq. Youe vote matters in Iraq for foreign policy.
Hell, I’d argue your vote matters in Iraq considerably moreso than it does in America or most of western Europe. America made SUCH a Democracy.
So of course naturally the Majority Shia Iraqi population voted in a government that immediately pivoted to Shia IRAN. (yes this is exactly as stupid as it sounds on the part of America, and yes Israel was very happy to encourage the US in toppling Saddam…in spite of the obvious outcome. You think this is bad, Israel funded Hamas in its early days to wield it against Arafat’s PLO… Israeli foreign policy is Golems turning on their master, all the way down)
But the number one implication of this is there’s basically an unbroken land connection of Iranian allies from Iran to the Israeli border, and the Mediterranean if we count the territory Hezbollah defacto controls in Lebanon…
This leaves Jordan.
From the Jordan river to…
Jordan is perhaps Israel’s most dangerous neighbor in terms of long term risk.
the Kingdom of Jordan is a small country of 11 million, comparable to Israel in size, but vastly poorer and with a much weaker army 100,000 and 65,000 reserves.
However Jordan is home to 2 million Palestinian refugees who’ve been in a semi-stateless status for generations with less than full rights living in refugee camps that have slowly evolved into towns but which have never been fully admitted to Jordanian society.. partially because Jordan doesn’t want them, and partially because they could be highly destabilizing if they got full citizenship, represented 20% of Jordanian society, and start advocating their ethnic interests and demanding Jordan use it’s full force to advance the Palestinian cause.
Jordan like Egypt receives a great deal of US Aid with a nudge and a wink that this is conditional on playing nice with Israel. Jordan has received over 20 billion in Aid from the US since 1951, and just before the Violence of October the US had signed a “memorandum of Understanding” in which the US agreed to increase Jordan’s aid to 1.45 billion per YEAR. A truly obscene amount of money for a country of 11 million people with a total GDP of 45 billion per year. This would represent over 3% of their GDP annually in direct cash infusions from the US taxpayer.
The US was willing to do this as part of it’s greater plan for a normalization of the relationship between Israel and the Arab states… which many have speculated Iran and Hamas launched the attacks of Oct 7th to torpedo, and prevent the nations of the middle-east from entering an order predicated on excluding Iran, and permanently shifting the Palestinian cause to the dustbin of history.
Jordan is so necessary for this because Jordan alone shares a border with the West Bank and what, according to international law, was supposed to be the largest area of Palestinian controlled land in Israel-Palestine.
In reality Israel administers the majority of the region and as such Israeli “Settlers” of various Jewish religious extremist sects, often move in, illegally claiming lands and even houses, often violently (think wild-west style land grabs)… and then recieve IDF protection to occupy lands they might have forced Palestinian families out of… not in 1947 or some bygone war of the 60s that displaced people… But a few months ago, in what most consider peace time.
Israel enforces its control of the West Bank with the Cooperation of Fatah. Fatah is what many consider the only legitimate Palestinian authority in contrast to the violent and militant Hamas, or the countless smaller militant groups that operate amongst Palestinians within Israel-Palestine and within the Palestinian refugee communities and international diaspora.
Fatah supporters argue it alone has the moral authority to speak for the Palestinian people and, according to many international liberal values, its claim to legitimacy is by far the best, winning elections in the West Bank and advocating Palestinian economic opportunities, however many Palestinians and militants would call it a Vichy Government working with the Israelis, enforcing Israeli warrants, and managing Palestinian decline and loss of land.
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The thing is in any wider regional war there is significant risk militants take root in the West Bank as they have in Gaza. Just over the summer Israel was clashing with Palestinian militants in the West Bank in one of the largest battles since the Second Intifada, an insurgency style conflict that killed thousands of Israelis and Palestinians between 2000 and 2005.
It is hard to quantify how many West Bank militants there are, aligned with Hamas or not… but Hamas has considerable presence in the area and 1 militant group, The Palestine Islamic Jihad, is estimated to have some 1000 militants.
Any break with Jordan, instability in Jordan, or loss of Israeli control over the border with Jordan could quickly result in massive numbers of small arms and foreign fighters Aided by Iran and Assad pouring into the West Bank, destabilizing the entire sector and exposing the 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West bank to violence, as well as potentially risking the Israeli Capital of Tel Aviv, the entire city of which is located in the 22 kms between the start of the West Bank and the Mediterranean.
The 9.3 Million Hostages that Is Israel
As of 2023 Israel (not including Gaza or the West Bank) has a population of 9.3 million, 7.1 million of which is Jewish, the remainder being a combination of Druze, Christians, and Muslims (a minority of all Christian and Muslim Palestinians who, through various happenstances of history, were in the right place at the right time to get Israeli citizenship).
And while the Israeli Fertility rate of 2.9 births per woman is better than the Iranian 1.71 or Saudi 2.46 fertility rates… it is worse than the Regional average, and most importantly worse than the Palestinian fertility rate of 3.57 (it is one of the great bizzare ironies that fertility almost universally INCREASES the more likely a people are to suffer violent death).
This puts Israel on a ticking clock… or it would, if its situation weren't already so obscenely lopsided.
Once you add Turkey, the combined population of the Muslim parts of the Middle-Easy and North Africa is approximately 500 million people. compared to Israel’s 9.3 million or 2% of the region’s total.
Put simply: Israel is a death trap.
That Israel exists at all in spite of its countless wars with this vastly larger population is probably the best argument that the Jews are genuinely the chosen people of God.
However we need not get metaphysical, for the Israelis are visibly the chosen people of God’s closest earthly approximation in power (and they’d have you in believe knowledge and benevolence as well) The US Government.
The USS Gerald R. Ford and its Carrier group is in the Eastern Mediterranean acting as a deterrent to America’s enemies trying anything against Israel, and less loudly trumpeted, as a threat to keep its “allies” like Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia in line so they don’t give into the temptation to do what their people would almost certainly demand.
And as of writing The USS Dwight D Eisenhower and its carrier group have just passed the Strait of Gibraltar in the past 24 hours and are now in the region and will be arriving and launching scouting and other missions within 48-72 hours.
Israel is incredibly dependent on this protection and US diplomatic influence…
Even with its quicker and more advanced military, Israel is not equipped to sustain any long term ground offensive war, whether that be high intensity such as exists between Ukraine and Russia today, or a rolling low intensity war such as existed in US occupied Iraq or Vietnam.
The Limits of the US Way of War
The Israeli Defense Force is configured along US lines: It’s 165,000 active force and 465,000 reserves are configured with a heavy emphasis on high-tech, special weapons, armoured warfare, and advanced communications and logistics. Like the US, in theory only 8-15% of its infantry divisions are dedicated trained Infantry at the Combat Division level. Combat divisions comprising only 25-50% of an army. at the army level only 10-25% of troops are in any combat role in any army, and in a US-style military it creeps down closer to the 10% mark, of which Trained infantry might be less than 5%.
In 2019 of the ~453,000 people in the US army fewer than 20,000 were Junior enlisted Infantrymen for a ratio of 4%, scandalously 20% below the nearly ~25,000 the army needed.
The Marine Corp, focused on expeditionary warfare managed significantly better, at 22,800 Marines with “Infantry” as their primary trade and 2150 Infantry Officers. For ~14% of the 177,000 Marine active force… which is considerably less than you’d think when you consider the Marines outsource large chunks of their logistics to the 500,000 active force US Navy.
Now most of these non-combat roles do fill some vital military function, however there’s always been a massive debate as to what extent large segments of the military consists of what, in corporate America, would be called “Bullshit Jobs”. Within Combat Divisions it can remain a relatively tightly run affair, Signals men or military police may not considered a combat arm, but they’re vital… but once you start looking outside combat brigades and certainly divisions, you can find some really extraordinary bloat.
This expansion of Clerks and non-combat specialists is universally criticized and occurs to all armies that face no or low-intensity warfare, but basically the only ways armies ever get reformed away from it is to face the discipline of actual brutal combat… outside of that the political will to start firing clerks or mass reassigning to remedial infantry schools just isn’t there.
There’s also the political problem: fighting in the infantry is the most miserable, casualty-prone, traumatizing trade in any military (save weird time specific deathtraps like the German U-Boat corp, or helicopter pilots in certain eras), there are certain personality types that thrive in infantry, but if you combine the 45-50k Combined marine and army infantry and throw in the 70k special forces (of which most are actually some sort of technician or vehicle operator) that’s about the number you can expect out of a population of 330 million like the US without things starting to degrade in terms of casualty ratio and morale, or a country’s culture really being stressed.
At present the IDF active force of 169,000 has 30,000 in combat roles, however this is across all combat roles which includes Artillery, armoured personnel, etc. Realistically IDF Infantry figures are 8000-15000 active infantry personnel.
Now the IDF has called up 360,000 reservists, approximately 4% of the Israeli population. And we can assume these reservists, all former Israeli Conscripts, match the same ratio, more or less, for potentially about 24,000-45,000 total infantry.
However, as reservists, they are significantly older, less fit, and less ready in general… and perhaps more importantly after the initial enthusiasm of the crisis, they’re more concerned to get back to civilian life.
Remember how the US had *maybe* 120,000 door kickers and trigger pullers in Infantry or some form of Special Forces out of a country of 330 million? If you adjust this Ratio to the Number of Israeli Jews that’s be only 2-3 thousand. You aren’t increasing that ratio 10 fold to get to those current called up estimates, without an equivalent collapse in morale and enthusiasm… since you’ve gone from the ~1 in 3000 freaks of nature at the tip of the spear to ~1 in 200.
And this for URBAN WARFARE.
Every one of Israel’s 4 Immediate fronts: Gaza, The Israel-Lebanon Border, The Syrian Border, The West Bank… All of these are population dense nightmares where no matter what you do, eventually you have to send in infantry to actually clear buildings or their ruble (which can actually be harder to take than them intact, because now it’s difficult to maneuver).
This was already something of a nightmare, but we’ve experienced multiple military revolution in the past 20 years thanks to advances in consumer electronics allowing for a plethora of cheap and engiously detonated Improvised Explosive Devices and the tactics of using them in concert to maximise casualties and control an opponent’s movements… We’ve gone from a world of tripwire and timer activated bombs, to cellphone and radio detonated explosives, to now full remote observation posts with cameras and microphones operating as eyes and ears for an observer/detonator man who might be miles away. This extends to the rapid advancement in consumer drones and their use in spotting enemies, as well as directly dropping explosives upon them or acting as a suicide drone and detonating a built in payload.
And of course Hamas is at the cutting edge of Urban Warfare in its use of prepared defenses and logistics tunnels.
The Cu Chi Tunnel Networks in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) were the bane of the American occupation.
Stretching 85 miles, the network was never fully broken, and indeed it took the Americans nearly the full length of the war to grasp the extent of it. This allowed the Viet-Cong a constant means to get around roadblocks, move troops and material… and indeed on some maps the Tunnels seemed to extend basically to the Cambodian border. At present a significantly widened section is open to tourists is probably one of the best sites to visit on a trip to Vietnam to get a feel for how tenaciously the Viet-Cong fought.
The Greatest army in the world at the height of Its power was unable to crush a tunnel network of 85 miles. As of 2021 Hamas openly claimed 311 miles (500 km) of Tunnels, in what was almost certainly a calculated understatement… meanwhile the entire Gaza strip is only 27 miles long.
Gazan ground lends itself to such tunnels, both from the rocky terrain and ease of construction… but also from the millions of unemployed and economically depressed Gazans.
In the US where regulation and labour costs make single subway stops take decades and cost billions, this can be hard to wrap your head around, but in Gaza where GDP per capita was 3.5k and you could hire a full time manual labourer for maybe $2000 a year… Hundreds of meters of tunnel could be constructed in a week at a cost of a few hundred dollars, mostly in building material.
Thus when you see meme maps like this that show small isolated tunnel networks, you should laugh.
The Vietnamese digging in secret in enemy territory, in the midst of a US occupation, built a larger network than this… stretching to the Cambodian border. And they did it in a wet country with a monsoon season.
I’ve seen lots of people saying that once Hamas runs out of fuel they won’t be able to run Generators to circulate air and the tunnels will become unlivable, or that Israel will resort to Poison gas to drive them out and render the tunnels death traps….
But neither of these happened in Vietnam. The Vietnamese built tons of redundancy, compartmentalization, and ventilation into their tunnel systems such that powered air circulation was not needed, and poison gas could never take out anything but small sections and individual access points. The vietnamese regularly purposefully flooded segments of tunnels so that anyone travelling between segments would have to swim through narrow pitch black murky confines creating a 100% perfect air gap between segments of tunnel… and then they’d also flood false passages ending in booby traps or merely endless water such that an intruder would drown. Combine a few of these with a flooded section long enough that one HAS to precommit to swimming the entire way and you make it impossible to tell which is the correct spur unless you’re told and hold up and invasion into the tunnel until they can get cave divers down there.
It’s likely most fighting position tunnels will have features like these. If the Vietnamese did it with hand trowels, Hamas will have done it with decades to prepare.
But beyond that on the logistics tunnels side: there is no way Hamas doesn’t have multiple redundant connections from the Egyptian border to the northernmost edge of Gaza city. Indeed this would be amongst the first goals in constructing the tunnels since this is the greatest vulnerability they face against Israel’s mechanized military.
At present (October 30th) Israel is trying to maintain its technological advantage, avoid urban fighting as much as they can, and cut off Gaza City from the rest of the Strip… how this ties into their actual objectives is debated: Do they intend to Annex Gaza city? Are they hoping to Separate Hamas from the population where they can starve them out? Or is this just something they think they can do with the limited resources they have that will save face and have a lower risk of going sideways? Who really knows.
But this plan of encirclement is not likely to work how they hope.
South of Gaza City Israel is pushing a relatively less populated gap of Exurbs, orchards and dusty desertous Farm land. Which I haven’t seen named by anyone… so I’ll call it the Mughraqa Gap. For the largest town/Suburb within the gap.
On paper this is the Chicken’s neck of Hamas controlled territory whereby they could grab ahold and strangle off Gaza city of supplies and fighting men without having to fight their way into Gaza City and risk the nightmare that’d represent.
In theory by Capturing the 7-8 kms (4-5 miles) between the ANZAC Monument and the sea by Sharm Park (see on map below)… they should be able to severe all above ground connection between Gaza City and the rest of the Strip, and then use higher precision vehicle towed ground penetrating radar (as opposed to airborne ground penetrating radar), to Identity the deepest and lowest profile Hamas tunnels… Destroy them with bunker busters, or sappers and ground based munition. And then starve out the Garrison of Gaza city.
A plan that’d make sense to any commander in any era.
Surround, cut off, Besiege.
The problem is the Mughraqa Gap… isn’t much of a gap.
The Gap itself between the Nuseirat Camp and the clustered small cities around there, and Gaza city in the north is only about 5 km (3 miles) wide. When one considers that the more advanced anti-tank guided missiles have a range of 2+ kilometers, small consumer drones regularly have a range of 5-10 kilometers, smuggled or home-made mortars can easily have a range of 1.5-5 km, and even old-school conventional battle rifles from the cold war have an effective range of 800-1000 meters (1km) in the hands of someone who understands the principles of marksmanship and how parabolas work…
That’s a lot of overlapping fire coming from north and south for a small gap of 5 kms…but even that’s overstating how large the gap is.
The town of Al Mughraqa at the center of the gap had a population of 11,500 before the war and would be considered a relatively large obstacle up north in the Russo-Ukraine war. And It’s neighbouring, nearly attached, town of Al Zahra had a population of 5300.
The thing is these separate towns are only really separate from the cities to the south in that a small river some might call a ditch divides them. When you look closely the gap between their suburbs and the dense cities beneath them is only about 500 meters wide.
Needless to say this a trivial amount of distance to tunnel, and it doesn’t look like there are really great sightlines where the Israelis could control this nigh non-existent gap between the cities of the South and Mughraqa.
I’ll put money on the table now, and bet we’re almost certainly going to be referencing Mughraqa and Zahra years from now as major battles. Israel both has to take them and hold them for their strategy of besieging Gaza City to work… lest they be taking pot shots at all hours in the little open space that remains, and their arrangement basically guarantees that Hamas will always have an exposed Israeli flank to strike at no matter how much of both the Israelis hold, whilst Hamas will never be able to fully dominate or retake it because both towns are still far less dense than that the actual cities of the Gaza strip and far more exposed to Israeli armor and airpower.
This is the kind of thing that could easily turn into a slugging match between asymmetric forms of firepower, with no ground completely safe.
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So far it looks like Israel has captured the outlying town of Juhor Ad Dik without much contest and its tanks have pushed to the Salah Al Deen highway, that central road that cuts north-south through the center of the Gaza strip, they’ve had engagements just north (a few hundred meters) of Mughraqa where they’ve engaged in clashes in the past 24 hours as of writing.
But if they intend to make it to the sea and hold this gap long enough to scan the deepest tunnels and starve out Hamas… that’s probably going to take miserable weeks of holding that gap. If Hamas can be starved out in that timeframe… and if Hamas doesn’t have trickier tunnels.
Digging tunnels underwater, is actually not necessarily that complex a task. It can be a complex nightmare… but depending on the rock, its durability, and how permeable it is to water, it can be a fairly straightforward task.
If you visit Niagara falls you can take “The tour behind the falls” or do a full tour of “the tunnels under the falls” dug as a runoff point for the nearby hydro generating station in 1901. With one of the most energetic rivers in the world over head… the tunnel holds up even as the falls themselves erode something like a solid foot of rock backwards each year.
With turn of the 20th century technology this was very doable… indeed people have been mining out under the sea for centuries.
What are the odds Hamas has a tunnel that extends out several hundred meters under the Mediterranean and runs a good portion of the length of the Gaza Strip, connecting Gaza City to the rest of the Strip even if Israel succeeds in securing the Muhraqa Gap and seemingly strangling the Chicken?
It’d be between 100 and 800 meters out, far enough that no ground-based ground penetrating radar could be stretched detect it, close enough that submarines and surface ship can’t get in close enough to scan for it… and just the right distance from shore that even if Israeli Airborne radar is vastly better than anyone would think, the constant rolling of the surf would make any scan completely uneven and inconclusive…
Given they could dig a tunnel network under Niagara Falls in 1901 with bloody gas lanterns, that’s still holding up and shown off to tourists today… I really don’t think we can put that beyond Hamas.
And it doesn’t look like Israel is putting it beyond them either.
Israel appears to be pushing another Urban coastal offensive along the sea and waterfront of Gaza City, with the goal of eventually meeting up with the other offensive in the Mughraqa Gap, so a complete ground encirclement can be achieved, and all potential tunnels scanned by immediate ground penetrating radar.
This would actually be 100% guaranteed to cut off Hamas within Gaza city…
But can Israel do it?
This would be a 7-9 km push through some of the densest prepared urban terrain of any battlefield in history. Shoulder fired rpgs, recoilless rifles, and anti-tank missile systems will be able to operate from their optimal ranges… amatuer snipers would be able to land quite effective fire from short ranges of 100-300 meters, drones, mortars, and all the urban warfare tactics you might have read about in some obscure manual will all come into play… IEDs everywhere, enemies with major and lesser networks of tunnels and hidden pathways.
All with Israel’s 8000-15000 active infantry… maybe 24,000-45,000 once we add in reserves… and maybe back down to a third of that once we take in all the other fronts they have to have forces deployed to in case of attack or escalation by any of the other actors in the region.
Can you push through 7-9 kilometers of pre-prepared, do or die urban warfare, with 8-15k infantry? Can you do it while fighting a running multi-environment, asymmetrical slugging match over the Mughraqa gap?
There’s a major risk in terrain that dense that Israel will depend too heavily on their firepower and air superiority… and wind up rendering the terrain impassable to their mechanized forces, but likewise there’s a delicate balancing act Hamas has to play between maintaining the aggression and discipline to fight Israel over every inch in spite of their firepower… yet not to dig their feet in so hard they fail to make their retreats and properly execute defense in depth.
How many casualties can Israel endure before they have to call it off? How long will their population put up with the fighting if it starts to drag?
How many casualties can Hamas endure and keep fighting? At what point do Gazans or the concerns of their commanders make things untenable?
We don’t know.
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And we don’t know what the powers around Israel are likely to do.
I heard a theory someone explained, that the real stretch of time that matters in regards to geopolitical events is the first week or two. Realistically if any faction has a hardline in some classified document, or unstated schellings point where they absolutely must go to war… it usually comes to the fore in the first week or two, and then the game of alliances takes off via its natural logic... so much of this stuff is time dependent that most of it is set up to operate close to a hair trigger, like the outbreak of ww1 or ww2 and all the alliance partners having to reveal what they’d already planned to do at lighting speed. For board gamers, this is the equivalent of the collective turn in Diplomacy . Everyone writes down their move, and then every move happens at once.
Thus, according to this theory, the events of Oct 7th in themselves are not likely to result in a wider war, nor the Israeli intervention against Gaza… neither of these were especially extraordinary from a geostrategic perspective, and basically every actor knew and had plans for the event of another Gaza-Israel war… the Scale of the attacks and the scale of Israel’s response was certainly unique, but nothing that didn’t line up with pre-existing playbooks. Nothing immediately happened, so nothing is likely too happen.
The real fallout is whether or not Israel’s normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia can go through, or whether that’s become so toxic to the Arabian public even the House of Saud could never force it through… A political process that will take months, and vary between two type of peace.
However there are now two “Next moves” that will happen in the global geostrategic space.
The first “move” is occurring right now. What happens when Israel finally gets stuck in on its ground offensive into Gaza? Has Hezbollah been waiting for Israel to be fully committed in the south before it attacks in the north? Does Assad have something planned once Israeli forces are committed? What about the various militant movements in the West Bank?
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And then the Second “move” coming up is what happens when the Ground invasion succeeds or fails?
If Hezbollah does nothing as this battle happens they basically have to strike as the battle ends.
If Hamas succeeds in repelling Israel, Hezbollah would have to basically go all out. Militant groups like this compete for market share in the hearts and wallets of extremist supporters and patrons across the region. If Hamas were to win and Hezbollah did nothing then they’d quickly go from the preeminent militant group in the region, rolling in cash and foreign volunteers from Iran and communities across the region… to being near forgotten “also rans” who sat on their hands as the most glorious moment of Islamic Resistance to the Zionist occupier occured.
If Hamas is wiped out this isn’t as pressing. Hezbollah could do a minor retaliatory offensive to “avenge” their “brothers” in Hamas… but if Hamas wins then they really have to push hard.
Also non-cynical ideology and ethnic fellow feeling might play out. Presumably at least the lower level supporters of each group feel a kinship and identification… but whether Israel wins or loses, Hezbollah basically has to do something this turn or next… and if things go badly for Israel the pressure to mount a major offensive will be hard to resist.
The Tragedy of the Central Position
“The Strategy of the Central Position” is amongst the most famous strategies in all of military history. Heavily identified with Napoleon.
By seizing the Central position between enemy armies, who ideally struggle to communicate; who ideally are of different loyalties; and who ideally are slower and weaker than you…. you can fight a series of aggressive quick battles against one then the other, whilst your opponents all struggle to coordinate and attack you all at once.
This is a glorious strategy. Executed successfully it allows a smaller force to win a series of battles against enemies, which combined, might outnumber them by multiples. The commander and army that successfully executes it not only covers themselves in glory, they make it look easy, winning what are in fact a series of relatively easy battles, but creating an image of military genius and invincibility, as the names of their victories wrack up and their forces seemingly make short work enemies much larger than them.
Of course the ilusion conceals the actual quality of the successful commander and his men… who invariably are better, but not actually 10x better than their opponents.
“Now that I know about coalitions I respect Napoleon rather less!”
-Marshall Foch (Supreme Allied Commander, 1918-1920)
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This illusion of course leads to the great Tragedy of the Central Position… It is not enough to merely win its many battles, for the concentrated smaller force employing the strategy of the central position: it must win Decisively! and then successfully break off from the fight to engage the next of its enemies.
Even a good engagement can be disastrous if the opponent cannot be conclusively defeated.
At Leipzig (Oct 1813), The Battle of Nations, Napoleon could not conclusively win the first or second day, and by the third and forth was facing 4 armies from 5 nation… when his final attempt to break off and retreat blundered as a French Corporal detonated the only bridge out of Leipzig too soon, 10s of thousands of his army and 10s of thousands more of his casualties, many his best, most veteran men, were forced to surrender and be taken prisoner…
over the next few months Napoleon would heroically defend the French countryside near Paris with untrained conscripts, one of his Marshalls (a general and titled nobleman) having to teach a teenage conscript how to use a musket in the midst of combat… but all for not. By May 1814, a mere 7 months later, Paris had fallen, and Napoleon had abdicated to Elba.
Napoleon would use the Strategy of the Central position again during his Waterloo campaign after he escaped Elba in 1815… But his Battle with Wellington would stretch too long, and despite, according to many estimates, seemingly having won against Wellington… Blucher and the Prussians arrived just before nightfall. Turning what should have been a hard fought victory into one of, if not, THE most famous and decisive military defeats in history.
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Israel’s entire military history is defined by its central position between a nest of bickering powers that struggle to coordinate with each other and all of whom its been consistently able to militarily outclass individually…
And So far it hasn’t gotten into the trap Napoleon found himself, in in large part because all of these wars could be ended with US diplomatic (and threatened military) intervention.
Israel gets involved in wars it can decisively win in the short term but which by rights would doom it on any long term time-horizon… and then US pressure starts a peace process locking-in Israel’s early military victories.
If the US detached from the region there’s no real reason a future regional war couldn’t drag out for years like the Russo-Ukraine War, or the Iran-Iraq War, and draw in most, if not all, of its historic enemies. At which point Israel’s massive population disadvantage would almost certainly doom it to possibly falling back as far as the 1947 lines… or even being forced to settle for a One State solution dominated by Palestinians such as the White South Africans were forced to accept, or evacuating from the region entirely.
Israel has nukes… But because time and numbers would be against them they probably would have to settle for using them as a threat or bargaining chip… Actually deploying them against Arab Armies or cities would guarantee that no peace or evacuation would happen. Resorting to nukes would sign their death warrant and guarantee a longer bloodier fight to the end.
This is of course a mythical scenario.
the odds of a rolling years long regional war taking place without US or European involvement is unthinkable…
However, this underlying tension points to another scenario I think are far more dangerously likely.
Israel right now is facing militants on 4 fronts, and if we’ve learned anything from the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, or really the entire region… the Arab-Muslim world can sustain tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Active non-state militant fighters at any given time… and they can replace their losses very consistently.
If Israel’s invasion into Gaza is indecisive, there’s a very real risk it just never ends.
The attacks of October 7th have shown the security around Gaza is insufficient to prevent attacks out of Gaza and into Israeli territory. It’s almost certainly been inspiring to factions in Lebanon whether that be Hezbollah sub-groups or others… and its almost certainly given ideas to militants in the West Bank… and its most certainly advertised Palestine to a generation of young foreign fighters and Jihadists turning 18 and deciding which warzone they want to go to for their religious education.
Israel cannot sustain its current reserve call up. Those 360,000 people now in uniform are going to want to get back to their lives in a few months, and at 4% of the Israeli population, Israel needs them to get back to their lives and start paying taxes instead of costing taxes again… especially with a global recession starting.
If Israel cannot decisively close out the Gaza invasion, pivot, and counter whatever Hezbollah’s going to do, keep the Golan heights and the Syrian front in their hands, and keep the West Bank to its usual dull roar…
If it can’t do all that in very quick succession, there’s a real risk one of these fights will turn into what Iraq was to the US and just keep going… for years. There’s a risk that Israel will have to start sending those reservists back to civilian life without anything approaching a ceasefire or peace, and that this conflict will just become a gaping wound in Israeli society.
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Which all things told, would be survivable. The US carrier fleets would still be in the region providing intel, US special forces would still be conducting raids and other things that the president can plausibly tell the American people aren’t war… things will reach an agreeable stalemate…
but Israel will stop being the developed 1st world Mediterranean country it advertises to tourists, and become more like the miserable violent middle-eastern countries that surround it; it will become a less desirable place to do business or recieve an education; the 17% of Israelis who have foreign passports will increasingly use them; the draft will become less like jury duty to young Israelis and their parents, and instead become a major source of fear and soul searching, and societal friction…
And then something else will happen on the world stage. The Ukrainian state might collapse and Russia seeming “win” everything it wanted…. China might invade Taiwan… America might get drawn into a hot war with the Mexican cartels… The market might crash… Trump might win only to keel over of aneurysm or stroke every single one of his supporters INSISTS was a CIA assassination…
And then Hamas or Hezbollah might launch another major offensive, and major regional actors might be poised this time to exploit the opening with their own advance… and America might be tied down elsewhere with its own problems (it won’t be two Carrier groups off Israel’s shore forever)…
And that could break the Israeli society and state.
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In Conclusion: The Curse of the Eighth Decade
There is a superstition: “The Curse of the Eighth Decade” which states that going back to King David no Jewish state has survived longer than 80 years. Some dispute this or find seeming exceptions… whilst other point out this seemingly occurs in other nations as well, see the US Civil War 85 years after the Declaration of Independence, the French Third Republic fell to the Nazis in 1940 in its eighth decade, The USSR fell after 74 years… Etc.
This has been a matter of some superstition coming up on Israel’s 80th anniversary in 2028. Palestinian and Islamic commentators say it portends their final victory… whilst many Jewish commentators, including Presidents Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu have mentioned it in their speeches, with commentators and Israeli nationalists arguing for their preferred massive changes and aggressive moves as the only way to conquer the supposed curse…. whether that be Israel’s recent constitutional fracas, or the recent push by settlers in the West Bank, or the massive Diplomatic effort to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, (which may have motivate Iran to push Hamas to make this offensive)
Israel did not need to do a full scale ground invasion of Gaza in response to October 7th. Israeli commentators compared the attacks to 9/11, but ask Americans today and most wish the US had held off on taking over Afghanistan or Iraq in the following years… Indeed the damage those two wars did to American society, finances, and prestige can be said to be the real damage Bin Laden did to America, the loss of a few buildings and 3000 civilian lives paling in comparison to the trillions spent and tens of thousands who’ve committed suicide or developed addictions after their experiences in the war on terror.
But as the talk of one final Apocalyptic Military, Geostrategic, Political and Religious test of the Israeli State heats up… and as it becomes a talking point motivating aggressive policy towards Gaza and the West Bank, and the more it gets repeated by actors and commentators on both sides… the more it risks becoming that most dangerous of prophecies about the Holy Lands: the Self-Fulfilling kind.
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Thank You if you’ve read this long!
For my regular Subscribers thank-you so much for your patience over the past month, especially to my Paid subscribers who make all of this possible.
I took a vacation to Washington, D.C. Earlier this month, expecting to come back with a number of scathing things to write about the people and nature of the Imperial capital… only for War to Break out and to be buried in researching this project for the next few weeks.
Lots of smaller (please God be smaller) takes are coming, including hopefully a closer look at Oct 7th and the Tactics, impressive and horrifying, that Hamas employed.
As well as finally, FINALLY, finishing my sequel on Motorcycle Warlords.
Thank-you so much,
Kulak
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
As the U.S. inches closer and closer to losing its superpower and world reserve currency status, its peripheries will come under increasing strain -- i.e. Israel, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, control over Europe, etc. The U.S. population has no appetite for another boots-on-ground Middle Eastern war after the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, no matter how hard Fox News tries to shill it onto the retarded masses. Also, the West seems to have no counter to cheap drones at this point, and Iran is the master of them (and hence their proxies are benefitting).
Furthermore, Israel is unable to decisively win a war against its neighbors because the illusion that Hamas/Hezbollah are somehow divorced from the population that supports them is completely nonsensical, yet Israel cannot punish the non-combatant populations without incurring a level of PR hits that could put its existence at risk (given it basically relies fully on the U.S. for its existence). It's best possibility would be to push the Gazan population out of Gaza, but no one wants to take them given how difficult they are (see the instability in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon etc. that they cause). Not a single Middle East country will offer the Palestinians citizenship or refuge, and it would be beyond foolish for the West to try to take them in.
Definitely a grim situation for Israel moving forward.
I can debate an awful lot of points in this article, but Kulak raises a lot of points that we should consider.
Pray that she is wrong.
But history would suggest that there is at least a possibility of some of this being right.
And both political and military leaders need to keep this in mind.
Israel needs to win every war.
The Arabs only need to win once.
If you think that there is a lot of antisemitism now, think about a world where 7 millions Israeli Jews are looking for a home.